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Blair Says He Plans to Resign in Next Year

LONDON, Sept. 7 — Bending to pressure, Prime Minister Tony Blair announced today that he would leave office within the next 12 months, heralding the end of a remarkable three terms in office during which he has lifted the nation’s mood at home but plunged it into unwelcome wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

His pronouncement meant that, some time around or before next summer, Mr. Blair will resign the leadership of the Labor Party and make way for Gordon Brown, his finance minister, to take over as prime minister. For much of this week, Britain’s political village has been gripped with the spectacle of a brutal behind-the-scenes power struggle between the two men. On Wednesday, eight junior aides quit Mr. Blair’s camp, leaving the sense of a land in crisis.

In what seemed a carefully choreographed series of pronouncements, Mr. Brown first made a separate announcement today, drawing back from a showdown with his onetime ally. “I will support him in the decision he makes,’ Mr. Brown said.

It was not clear whether the absence of a clear timetable would satisfy a restive Labor Party, many of whose legislators have been clamoring for an exact date for him to leave before local elections next May. Mr. Blair, who has said he will not seek a fourth term, has been desperate to set the conditions of his departure, anxious to mold a legacy of achievement to offset the profound unpopularity he has garnered from his close alliance with President Bush in the Iraq war.

At a previously scheduled visit to a school in North London, Mr. Blair said today that the critics had “not been our finest hour.” But reversing his refusal to say when he would leave — even in the broadest terms — he acknowledged the forthcoming annual conference of his Labor Party would be his last. “I’m not going to set a precise date,” he said. “I don’t think that’s right. The precise timetable has to be left up to me.” He did not rule out drawing up a schedule later.

Mr. Blair said he wanted to apologize for the newest crisis. “It’s the public that comes first and we can’t treat the public as uninterested bystanders,” he said, seeming to warn Labor politicians to avoid further feuding.

The choice of a school was significant, denoting Mr. Blair’s desire to be seen not just as a warrior but as a leader who enhanced public services, like schools and health care. But his record has been overshadowed by his commitment to fighting what he calls an “elemental” battle against terrorism after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, on the United States and the bombings of July 7, 2005, in London.

For his part, Mr. Brown, less charismatic than Mr. Blair, has been a Labor Party stalwart throughout his political life, taking credit for a remarkable era of economic growth while assuming a far less prominent posture on the issues that have consumed Mr. Blair in recent years, like the relationship with the White House and the war in Iraq.

In 1994, when Labor was still in opposition, Mr. Brown stood back to allow Mr. Blair to take over the Labor Party leadership in what has been depicted as a private deal under which Mr. Brown would one day take over the party leadership.

Since then, Mr. Brown has grown increasingly restless as Mr. Blair declined to redeem his pledge to relinquish office. Two years ago Mr. Blair said he would not fight a fourth election, signaling a handover to Mr. Brown. The crisis this week has been building since then. Last Friday in an interview with The Times of London, Mr. Blair told his followers to stop “obsessing” over the date of his departure. Those remarks drew an angry response from Mr. Brown’s followers.

But after a private meeting between the two men on Wednesday, described in some newspaper reports as a shouting match, the rivalry between them seemed to have reached what many legislators called an endgame. In a test of strength, Mr. Blair faced demands from Mr. Brown’s supporters for a schedule for an early departure but he has resisted them. With their remarks today both men seemed to back away from a showdown that would have damaged them both, leaving Mr. Blair appearing to have been hounded out of office by ungrateful conspirators.

Mr. Blair took power in 1997 on a wave of euphoria that built as he struck the 1998 Northern Ireland peace agreement and, with Mr. Brown running the economy, opened the country to a remarkable period of low unemployment, low interest rates and high employment.

In foreign affairs, he built a close relationship with President Bill Clinton and took a prominent role in the Kosovo war, a forerunner of his interventionist policies in the Muslim world. He was returned to office with another landslide in June 2001.

But it was on Sept 11, 2001, that Mr. Blair’s tenor and style changed. He became a close ally of President Bush first in Afghanistan then in Iraq — a war that was deeply unpopular among many Britons, including Muslims who argued that the vision of British troops fighting in Islamic countries as allies of the United States exposed the country to terrorist attack. His handling of the Iraq invasion, moreover, cost him the trust of many Britons. “It’s been a difficult week,” Mr. Blair said today, “but it’s time now to move on.”